


The Man Who Was Not There

by ariel2me



Series: Stannis & Tywin [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-05-24 19:35:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14960834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariel2me/pseuds/ariel2me
Summary: Stannis Baratheon, Tywin Lannister, and a tense exchange during the wedding of Robert Baratheon and Cersei Lannister.





	1. Chapter 1

_It struck her, as it often had in the past, how he could shape so persuasively the twisted logic of his vision of the world and its ways; he managed it, she judged, by stating the most doubtful propositions with the least emphasis, smoothly, a touch wearily, as if he were rehearsing truths that no one ever, anywhere, would think or have thought to question._ _(Mrs. Osmond, John Banville)_

* * *

 

The bride’s father was not smiling. Tywin Lannister never smiled, it was often said, but his satisfaction, if not necessarily pleasure, was apparent to the groom’s brother nonetheless. It was hidden beneath the steady rise and fall of his voice, and submerged under the chilly glare of his eyes, but it was there nonetheless – Lord Tywin’s satisfaction at the marriage of his daughter to a reigning king.

Pale green eyes flecked with gold; that was how Lord Tywin’s eyes were often described. Were there  _truly_  flecks of gold in those eyes, wondered Stannis, or were most observers fooled by the thought of Lannister gold, and ended up imagining its shade in the eyes of Tywin Lannister where none actually existed? Stannis had not noticed the color of those eyes as a boy of four, when his father took him to court for the first time, when he and Robert mistook Tywin Lannister for the king.  

There were indeed flecks of gold in those pale green eyes, confirmed Stannis, after staring at them for quite some time. Tywin did not appear to be amused, or even bemused, at the scrutiny. He returned Stannis’ gaze with an implacable gaze of his own, as if dropping his eyes before Stannis dropped his own would have been an intolerable acknowledgment of defeat.

“You remind me of your father,” he said, in a voice so devoid of expression that Stannis could not even begin to guess if those words were meant as a compliment, or a condemnation, or perhaps even some kind of warning.

“My brother Robert is the one who has our father’s looks.”  _You are truly your father’s son._  Stannis had given up counting how many times this had been said about Robert.

“He has your father’s looks, aye, and your father’s laugh, but he does not have your father’s stern and disapproving expression, when a matter greatly displeased him. Does this wedding displease you, Stannis?”

“Would that matter to you, Lord Tywin, my pleasure or displeasure?”

“No. Why should it? But I’m curious nonetheless.”

“I am not obligated to satisfy your curiosity.”

“Your father would have been pleased with this marriage. We were  _very_  close companions as young boys, in the days when we were both serving as royal pages.”

“You and the late King Aerys were very close as well, my father told me. That did not stop your son from murdering him. Closeness between the fathers does not always lead to matrimony between the children.”

“Your father and Aerys were also very close, and they were cousins besides. That did not stop your father’s eldest son from spearheading a rebellion against Aerys.”

“My brother had no choice in the matter. King Aerys called for his head.”

“My son had no choice either. Aerys –“

“Called for his head too?”

“Aerys called for  _my_  head. Would you not have done the same for your father, Stannis? Would you not have killed Aerys to save your father’s life?”

“My father never betrayed the late king.”

“I supported a _just_  rebellion. I hear that you are  _all_  about justice, Stannis,” replied Tywin, in a mordant tone. “My son by marriage was telling me about the smuggler whose fingers you shortened, despite the great deed he performed for Storm’s End during the war.”

Stannis clenched his jaw. Robert had no right to turn it into an amusing story for him to tell all and sundry, no right at all. Were they laughing about it, Robert and his kin by marriage?

“If you considered Robert’s cause to be  _just_ , why did it take you so long to make up your mind about which side to support?”

“I’m surprised at your question, Stannis. Didn’t your father teach you not to be reckless? That was always Steffon’s watchword, caution.  _Excessive_  caution, at times. He was always –“

“I am his  _son_. I do not need you to  _lecture_  me about what my father was like. I do not need you to explain my father as he was to me, to pretend to reveal him to me as if he's a secret I have yet to discover. He is _my_ father, not yours.”

“You were four-and-ten when he died. How well did you truly know him? Your father was also four-and-ten when his own father died. He never truly saw his father for the man Ormund Baratheon had been either.”

“And  _you_  did? You, the son of another man, knew more about my father’s father than  _he_  did?” asked Stannis, furious with Tywin Lannister’s presumption.

“Sometimes it requiresdistance to see the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Your father tried so hard to live up to his father’s example, to be a good man as his father would have defined being a good man meant. It ended up bringing about his own death. He did not throw his lot with Aerys’ dissenters when he should, when there were many voices clamoring for him, with his royal blood, to lead the opposition against his cousin. He sailed to find a bride for Rhaegar as Aerys commanded. He stayed loyal, like his father stayed loyal to King Jaehaerys and led the king’s army in his place. He was nostalgic for the Aerys we knew as a boy. He believed with all his heart that the man Aerys had shown himself to be was not the man Aerys truly was. He was sentimental about the past, the past that had no relevance to the present, or to the future. That was a costly error. A lord should never allow sentiment to cloud his judgment, or to –“

“Or to get in the way of his ambition?”

“Ambition is a dirty word to you, I suppose? It was to your father. He could not bear to be thought ambitious, to be seen as though he was striving and pushing for more than what he already possessed. He wanted to be seen as good, not just tobe good.”

That was  _not_  the father Stannis knew,  _not_  the father he remembered. Four-and-ten was too young an age to lose a father, but old enough to know the man’s essential nature. He was not blind to his father’s flaws and weaknesses – the faith and trust Steffon Baratheon retained for both Aerys and Tywin to the end of his life was one of his biggest faults – but the man Tywin Lannister described, the man who wanted to be  _seen_  as good, who made a virtue of being  _seen_  as good, was a stranger to his son, a shadow of Tywin’s own creation.    

 _He twists things,_ thought Stannis, _to make everything look distorted, to claim a superior understanding. He tries to make you doubt yourself, doubt your conception of good and evil, of what is honorable and dishonorable, of what is just and unjust._

That was Tywin Lannister’s greatest ruse, to make black seem white and white seem black, and to make the inversion appear as if it was the most reasonable thing in the world, the way it _had_ to be, the way it _must_ be, the only way it _could_ be.


	2. Chapter 2

Steffon’s second son was smoldering with rage, glaring at Tywin as if he believed his gaze could set the Lord of Casterly Rock on fire. Predictably, Tywin’s unflattering summation of his father’s character had not gone down well with Stannis Baratheon. The Baratheons had an infamous reputation for their prickly pride and belligerence, and this one was certainly living up to that reputation.  

Steffon also had charm, though. Steffon had charm in spades, Tywin remembered, a gift he could turn on and off at will, it seemed, when it suited him. This second son of his appeared to have none of his father’s charm, only his stubbornness.

His stubbornness, and his determination to defend his father against any slight, perceived or otherwise. Tywin could still recall the furious glare Steffon had given anyone who  _dared_  to speak ill of his father, and the long-winded explanations he had felt compelled to give to justify his father’s words and deeds.

Steffon's fatal flaw, in Tywin's eyes, was that he tried too hard to be like his father, whose misguided notion of what it meant to be a good man ultimately led to his death.

Tywin's great tragedy, in Steffon’s estimation, was that he was so desperate to be everything his father was not, to the point of losing sight of what it meant to be a good man.

“Your misguided notion of what it means to be a good man is not mine,” Tywin had replied with cold contempt. Nothing else needed to be said, as far as he was concerned. Desperate? He was not desperate. He was determined, resolute, strong-willed and strong-minded, not desperate. Steffon knew  _nothing_ , nothing at all.  

And who was Steffon to judge him for wishing to be as different as night and day from his father? Steffon did not have any conspicuous reason to be ashamed of  _his_  father. Tywin considered Steffon’s father a misguided man in many ways, but in the eyes of the world, Ormund Baratheon had never been the laughingstock of the entire realm like Tytos Lannister.  

It was inevitable, that the son of a man as weak and worthless as Lord Tytos would wish to be as different as the sun and the moon from his father. Tywin considered it his great triumph, not his great tragedy, that he was nothing like the man his father had been.

And perhaps it was also inevitable, that when a man lost his father at too young an age, before he became a man himself, he would end up idealizing the dead father, remembering only the good and none of the bad. If Ormund Baratheon had lived until his son reached his manhood, perhaps Steffon would not have spent the rest of his short life trying to emulate his father's example, trying to live up to his father’s standard.

No, the second case was  _not_  inevitable. Even if Lord Tytos had died when Tywin was four-and-ten, the same age Steffon was when Lord Ormund perished, Tywin would still have despised his father, would still have wanted to be nothing at all like him. “My children will never have any cause to be ashamed of me,” Tywin had declared.  

“Weakness is not the only cause for shame,” Steffon had replied. “Your patrimony could still be the inheritance of shame, if you think only of destroying your father’s legacy instead of building your own.”

Years later, his eyes locked in silent battle with the eyes of Steffon’s second son, Tywin thought,  _And what is your patrimony, Steffon? The inheritance of loss? Of sons who watched their father die and learned the wrong lesson from it? Of sons doomed to repeat their father’s mistakes?_


End file.
